Downtown - Part Five

Downtown

Part Five

            I didn’t stop visiting the Tippecanoe bottle.  Although I had “found” something “buried” just like it, it was ..not.. that bottle.  So I visited it just as much.  But now the travel to it from the school always included a memorial visit to the hole that the “crock” “was in”.  I couldn’t go by it without “stopping”.  There it was; a hole in the side of the stream bank.  More and more leaves seemed to find their way into the hole, even after I cleaned them out.  The impression of the crock at the bottom had “disappeared”.  I didn’t care.  It was a special spot.  Then:

            GONE!  One day the bottle at the store was GONE!  Someone bought it?  There was no impression of it left on the counter?  YES THERE WAS!  A little open space had a faint dust ring where... something with a round base had stood for a... long time.  “WHO?” I asked, a feisty demand that was out of character but did not phase the owner for he was convinced I “wanted” that bottle.  He seemed a little surly about his “It sold to a man and his wife.  Never seen ‘em before”.

            “Oh”.  That was it.  It was over.  WHY HADN’T I bought it!  I’ll never see it again!  Every dealer-collector knows these frantic mental lines.

            I did see it again.

            I had joined, as a result of my own discovery, a local collector association for those who collect old bottles.  It was an adult group that met once a month far away from my home so that I had to “force” my mother to drive me there and then... return to pick me up “later”.  I was not a star member.  I was, as a youth senses, in over my head.

            It was not that I couldn’t hold my own as a discoverer of rare old bottles.  It was that I was a youth amongst adults and these adults although acting like children when discovering old bottles were none the less ADULTS so to a youth the chasm of authority and power remained theirs.  These adults were... serious.  In hindsight a few were a touch past the word serious and toward the childhood meaning of the word “crazy”.  But I did, TOO, find old bottles so had no problem hanging around the edges of the association for THAT ACTION was the ticket to admission (after one paid “dues”).  The greatest attraction of the association meetings to me was the opportunity, each month, to display for sale, each to their own spot on tables “along the side”, items one had found that one wished to “swap” for PREFERABLY although never stated “cash”.  All one had to do was attend and “put out” one’s goods and, well, one could come home with a full wallet and an empty cardboard box.  This feature of the “association” I became an expert at, endeavoring to fully realize the potential of my “swap” “spot”.  I would find “stuff” each month before the meeting.  I would cautiously decide “what to bring”.  I would displayed the priced treasures and “dicker” one on one with, again in hindsight, some of the hardest adult crow-bait collectors I’ve… ever, ever …who were in fact willing to spend the three whole hours of the meeting beating me down five cents and other ridiculous wastes of human life energy upon “something” they “want”.  Although it is fine now to observe the lunacy of this intercourse, it did serve me “purpose” and VERY WELL for it was the first and foremost “training” I had selling “JUNK” to complete strangers who FREELY USED ANY TACTIC they “could” to have their way with me.  What a school:  It blew those junior high dirty magazine hallway deals out the side door of my life for “this was real”.

            Too real, probably.  We all know the power of human passion… and having that unlocked in an adult who “sees something they want” that “some kid found”… particularly if they (the adult) is off the record from their “real” life for the evening:  It can be and WAS “wild”.  “LET’ER RIP” “dealing” was “OK” at the “MEETING” so I quickly learned right there on that street how to ...fight on the street of antiquarian commerce.  Mumbling, muttering, marble mouth, ear scratching “CHEAP” “coming around” here introduced me to what I still, forty years later, endure DAILY.  HUMAN CHARACTER from “ALL WALKS” who, unleashed into the world of their “hobby” may drop with death defying clarity all decorum of their “day to day” and “whack the sand” out of “you” in an effort to “get something” “cheap” for their “collection”.  To review in my mind as I write the verbal vignettes that I listened to and ...believed ....from these fine people... is a lesson well learned young that has served me very well and I’m here today fully able to… dish it back TOO!

            The twist of this setting to “find” the Tippecanoe bottle manifested promptly at the next meeting after the bottle had been “sold”.  I attended as usual.  I displayed my goods for “swap” as usual.  I circulated amongst the other “swap spots” as usual, carefully scrutinizing the always priced so there “weren’t a nickel left in it” offerings of the other “members”.  NO PROBLEM.

            No problem until I “saw” a Tippecanoe bottle nestled amongst some other “finds” within the “swap space” of a short, stubby and both Humpty-round regularly attending, “got a great collection” couple whom I’d had a very small smattering of interaction with.  I promptly reached for the bottle.  It was sparklingly clean BUT it had a devastating inclusion to my knowing eye.  At it’s top, wedged just as I KNEW it to be, was the three-fourths piece of original cork that THE BOTTLE the FAT DRUNK “found” “HAD”.  Could not be ANY OTHER BOTTLE, no way.  I held it.  It was perfectly sticker priced “$50.-”.  “THAT’S THE BOTTLE!” screamed my mind.  “There’s a good one!” came a male voice behind my right ear.

            I turned to be face to face with a man (he was not that tall) dressed in dark blue crispy clean work clothes and “sporting” hair such as one knows instantly he (this being 1967) “hated hippies” which I was trying as hard as a junior high kid can to “be”.  He already had me in his sights for an “unloading on” for I HAD sold him “something” “once” and that was now a notched gun in his mind opening the door for the dreaded “collector revenge”.  This revenge is a sort of “all bets are off in commerce” until the tab is either “square” or HE had “advantage” on the notched gun in his head.  Fortunately I’d already been on the street enough to not only know about “collector revenge” but to be able to SEE IT COMING.  His identically proportioned “wife” barreled right in behind him.

            “JUST FOUND THAT!”

            “GOOD ONE!”

            “BEST!  PERFECT after we CLEANED IT UP!” were the first three one sentence paragraphs expressed upon me by the man before I could set the bottle back in its spot.  I said nothing and had no chance to say anything.

            “FORTY!”

            “THAT’S A GOOD BUY!” came two more complete paragraphs.  The wife smiled as my eyes passed from the man’s flint blue eyes to her equally sharp blues.  My mouth was forming the word “ah” and my mind was saying “THE BOTTLE” but I couldn’t extend that to my mouth.

            “WE FOUND THAT.  A GREAT ONE!”

            “BEST THING WE EVER FOUND!”

            “PROBABLY SHOULDN’T SELL IT!”

            “NEVER GONNA FIND IT AGAIN!”

            The one sentence paragraphs didn’t stop.  My mind could pass nothing to my mouth.  It was screaming to say that THIS was THE BOTTLE in the little store downtown.  The store downtown where the fat drunk man sleeps next to the building in the shade.  The store where that man had brought THIS bottle that HE FOUND in the lot behind the buildings on the path that I walk on all the time.  The store where that bottle sat on the counter still covered with dirt and retaining this exact piece of cork in exactly that position for a year with a twenty-five dollar fading and dust covered price sticker on it even though I handled it EVERY TIME I was “downtown” no matter what.  That the hole where the fat drunk man found the bottle on the path in the lot was still exactly there and I can show you it.  That I know all about this bottle and have wanted to buy it for twenty-five dollars for a whole year but never did and never ever thought anyone would ever buy it “for that” and SOMEONE DID and that someone is YOU.

            “I CAN’T SELL IT FOR LESS!”

            “Can’t” was a strange word for something one found for FREE.  My mind shifted to glided.  It WAS the same bottle.  I clashed eyes with the man’s eyes, then diverted to his swap spot.  My hand touched the top of the bottle.  It WAS the same bottle.  “He’s paid for it.  HE PAID the twenty-five” my mind announced between my ears.

            “AIN’T GONNA GET A BETTER ONE!” fired into the back of my head.

            Get?  But I wanted to find.  I mean.  I KNOW who FOUND this.  I know.

            I knew but I did not say.  I didn’t.  I went back to my swap spot.  Later, I slinked back to handle the bottle again.  The man was across the room and I knew he saw me.  But he adjusted his tactics to presume I “wanted that” but he should “lay off” and let me “come to him”.  It was definitely the same bottle.  That was it.

            I told my mother about it on the way home.  She didn’t remember the bottle, the incident of discovery and only acknowledge “how lucky” I “was” when I paralleled that find to the blue stoneware discovery and that the stoneware is “a wonderful piece”.  I gave up.

            I kept going to the store, always on the path through the vacant lot.  The man in the store never “had” any bottles.  He always had other things though and I perpetually “bought” “stuff”.  The fat drunk was usually around, sort of, but he never found anymore bottles either.  The whole incident faded into the past except that the couple who had bought the bottle kept bringing it to their “swap spot”.  I’d like to think they did this because they thought I was going to buy it for I very consciously handled it every time no matter what but I do realize that the reason they were bringing it was because they “had paid for it” so “want to get out of it”.  IF they had actually “found it”, I am sure they would have “kept it”.  BUT the twenty-five dollars had “hurt” and they had bought it purely as speculation.  Well... not pure speculation for it was obvious that they’d “jumped” at the “opportunity” when they first “discovered” “it” in the store, downtown.  This last was finally affirmed.

            One day I bounced into the store after school and there, MUCH to my surprise was “someone” at the counter and it was THE couple.  THEY were THERE.  I recognized them, they recognized me.  We both were equally not delighted to see the other there.  This refined our conversation.  “FINALLY FOUND IT!” the man said to me indicating I had found a secret source of theirs?  The owner of the store who was still stumbling with the “these people know each other?” clause meant my eyes with a perplexity indicating that he knew that I came here a lot more then these “who ARE they?” “did”.  That was enough to keep my mouth shut and after a bottle talk swap sentence or two I “hid” in the back of the store until they “left”.  I listened to every word.  The words were worth listening to.  The couple re-stated for the store owner that, in so many words, they were the greatest bottle buyers he was ever going to meet and if he “ever found anything again” to “call ‘em” and on and on and then... left.  GOOD-BYE.

            The store owner asked me “did” I “know them”.  By some luck of articulation I responded by saying “those are the people who bought that bottle” this last word slammed by pointing to the then full with something else spot on the counter where the gem had rested “for ever”.  Yes he said.  “I saw them with it” I said.

            “They bought it; paid for it.” he said in an actually charitable tone indicating that he knew I’d coveted it and, perhaps, had sort of wished I “gotten it”.  I sort of wished I had too, then.  But now, I KNOW I did “get that” bottle.  I got a lot out of that bottle.

The End

Downtown - Part Four

Downtown

Part Four

            I got the money; the “twenty-five” for “the bottle”.  I didn’t buy it.  This was the third thing I learned from the dirty fat drunk.  I didn’t know exactly what it was THEN but now I do.  For some unknown reason at that time, a reason I TRIED to account for, I ...didn’t want... “the bottle”.  Oh I thought... and thought.... very, very hard about it, even setting out on foot from school to “buy it; just buy it”.  But I didn’t.  I’d handle it again and put it back (always with the price tag pointing away from the counter front).  Then I’d end up “finding” “something else” “good” “to buy” and... leave.  Time and time again.  For nearly a year.  It was the spring of the following year before a crescendo of an experience closed the bottle from the vacant lot path incident.

            When I would walk to the store, I walked along the path.  More and more I found myself stopping on the path in the lot and looking around.  I actually seemed to stop AT THE SPOT where the bottle was excavated.  This spot was still visible for the hole, although no longer a perfect impression, did not fill up.  It was a humorously futile exercise of learning.  I would awake to find myself wasting valuable after school “picking” time gazing like a fool around an abandoned space on the wishful notion that another Tippecanoe bottle was going to suddenly burst from the earth.  Finally, after months of this training, I had one of those always USEFUL revelations that not only was this not going to happen but that I looked (and was acting) like an idiot.  There upon I stopped stopping in the vacant lot.

            But I did NOT stop stopping in OTHER vacant lots.  NOR did I stop stopping in other spaces... between.  In fact, I increased my travels to and through this sort of space and... have been “increasing” my travels ...ever since.  Mumbling and stumbling, climbing over or climbing down; climbing IN or going “out back”, “over there”, “through that” and “down behind” created a travel mode that took a two block as the crow flies and turned it into a mile long wilderness excursion.  I found things.  I took them home.  I sold them.  But I never found a Tippecanoe bottle, try and try again.

            One day, at the nearly a year later edge of spring, I traveled the odd trail found behind the little corner “convenience” store that was kiddy-corner from the back exit of the “play ground” of the Junior High School.  That store knew exactly why it was “convenient” to be “there”.  This trail bore south to a public park used for gym class baseball but also forked promptly to allow the selection of another trail that climbed the ridge bordering a stream.  It advanced along the top of that ridge off toward the urban wilderness where, eventually, one could leave it and cross a few streets to cut onto the vacant lot path and arrive where the “antiques shops” “are”.  It was nothing for me to move as fast as I could along the ridge with its scrappy trees and bushes, still barren in the early spring.

            My eyes moved right and left, fore and aft, down and up and “WAIT A MINUTE”.  Blue, the color caught my eye.  BLUE on the GROUND.  In the woods.  Down the bank, toward the stream.  BLUE on the ground in the bushes.  Down the bank, through the bushes to the blue I went.  The only reason I could see the blue was because it was the very edge of spring when land is most barren and exposed.  I could barely “see it”.  BUT IT WAS BLUE and a true blue that I ...knew.  Just as poetic as that I KNEW that BLUE for it was a certain OLD blue the had to be ONLY that OLD BLUE and that blue WAS GOOD; a good old blue.

            My foot pushed the packed leaves from the tinge of exposed blue.  More blue appeared.  I dropped to my knees and dug with my hands.  I KNEW I’d found THE blue.  What I found was the exposed surface of a “piece” of cobalt decorated American stoneware “buried” along the bank of the stream.  Digging was hard.  I had no tools.  Whenever I find something good, it’s always hard and I have no tools.  THAT’S THE ONLY WAY one finds “anything” “good” I ...believe.  Digging; I was digging.  With a stick, that promptly broke, and then with a long rock sliver as if a primitive man.  I exposed the “piece”.  It was a crock; an open urn shaped vessel of three gallons originally used for (generally) food storage.  The blue blossomed under my careless excavation.  A vibrant diffusion of calligraphic gesture picturing a rich cobalt floral spray spread upon the glistening gray-tan salt glazed surface of the ...buried vessel.  It was wholly buried, except for the little blue spot I spied.  WAS IT WHOLE?

            I couldn’t tell.  The woods and wilds are filled with shattered disappointments.  This seemed whole.  In mental image hindsight, I am relieved to note that the urn, lying on it’s side, had its top pointed downhill toward the stream.  This would (and did) prevent WATER from collecting inside the vessel.  This water would have frozen and thawed and that action would have “cracked” (broken) the jar.  It was perfect.  Well, almost perfect it turned out for there WAS a tiny “hairline” crack down the back side but that was “nothing”.  I dug until I could pull it out of the ground.  I carefully removed the dirt from inside.  This, although packed hard at the top, gave way and “dumped” out, again attributable to the downward position on the bank.  I rolled it (it was big) in my hands, holding on to the upper edge.  It was blue, it was perfect and it was marked “TROY NEW YORK”.  “Marked” was “good”.  Troy had several stoneware factories and “marked” pieces of “Troy” were (and are) “very” collectible.  I perspired but didn’t notice.  I dirtied my clothes but didn’t notice.  I didn’t notice anything.  Then I did.  I was staring down at the dark brown dirt in the hole.  The hole had a perfect impression of the vessel at the bottom.  Just like the Tippecanoe bottle.  I studied this.  WAS THERE MORE?  I scanned the surrounding ground.  No sign of anything else.

            I sat the crock down on the ground.  My hands were dirty.  My knees were muddy.  Did I see anything else?  I saw the brown crushed leaves of last fall beneath the twisting bushes.  These spread thin in the openings created by the trunks of the still dormant hardwood trees.  I saw the top of the ridge where the trail was.  I saw the sky meet the horizon formed by the dark line of the ridge with the twisted leafless branches silhouetted above it.  They waved and whipped for a breeze was blowing now.  I’m sure it was blowing before but... I hadn’t noticed.  The light turned bright toward the horizon for the cloud covered sun was headed there and I... should be headed home?

            I looked down at the crock.  I looked along the ridge.  A contemporary green soda bottle bobbed out of the leaves twenty feet away.  I walked over and kicked it loose.  It rolled down the bank but revealed no treasure.  It left a clear impression of it’s excavation below the leaves in the soil.  I went back and picked up the crock, carefully, this time avoiding the former grasp-by-the-rim grip I’d had used at first.  The urn was precious my mind told me.  My body responded with cautious handling.  “I can’t break it”.

            It was heavy, especially after several blocks.  It was awkward to carry for it’s girth prevented an under the arm sling.  Also, I carried my school books as I usually did.  These were in a pack so with that on my back I carried the jar with two arms folded around it and ...staggered onward.  I held the blue decoration toward my chest.  I didn’t want anyone to see “that”.

            At the church parking lot I waited.  I was early?  I didn’t know; usually I found clocks along the way to scare me to this meeting place.  There was no clock on the ridge.  Was I late?  How long did it take to find the crock?  I hadn’t considered that.  I reviewed the time expended and concluded that as I found the crock just after I left school that I couldn’t be late for this premature diversion into antiquities balanced with the time lost digging up this past.  The clouds rolled past the sun, thickening.  The wind blew.  Last fall’s leaves rushed along the fence at the end of the little parking lot.  I ignored this and scrutinized the vessel, rolling it with my hand carefully just off the pavement of the parking lot.

            My mother pulled in.  I could tell she saw the crock right away for she had to drive straight toward it and I at the end of the lot.  Also, she was chipper, gushing a “WHAT HAVE YOU GOT!”.  I knew SHE knew what “I’d got” for I knew SHE knew what blue decorated stoneware was and LIKED IT.  Conversation about antiquities is so much easier when it’s about something someone “likes”. 

            I told her the whole story and as this would be before the mandatory seat belt laws I am sure this included a lot of bouncing up and down on the seat.  I was in the front seat.  So was the crock.  It was on the seat between us, a place of supreme honor.  This was because usually anything I found had to ride “in back”, usually “way back”.  That the crock sat between us indicated wordlessly my mother’s extremely strong appreciation of “what” “I found”.  This immediate appreciation never ceased and the “Troy crock”(as it became known) was, I believe “the best thing” I “ever found” “with her” in her opinion.  She attached ownership to it from the parking lot on.  Of course I wasn’t going to sell it; it was too good.  Also:  I found it.  This was a vague commercial demarcation on the day of discovery but, as my time wore on, the demarcation became a boundary defined by my mother who eventually took the urn and placed it under a table “on display” just inside our front door.  I didn’t ever protest this for, well, my room WAS full and… that showoff spot WAS an “honor” and... well, what are you gonna do when your a kid.  Right?

Leaning Against the Wall

Leaning Against the Wall

Up in Vermont

I went to a house in a town.

I walked up to the side door

And knocked on that door

And it opened.

First we went to the back

Building because that’s where they

Had things they didn’t want.

Then we went to the garage.

Every time I bought something I

Set it outside the buildings on the lawn.

I paid them for each item I bought

In cash, right away.

The man handed the money to his wife.

She would count it again and

It would disappear.

They seemed very pleased.

In the barn I told them I could

Get the cupboard off the wall

With the crowbar in my truck

When I came back from the

Truck they said they had some

Things in the house “too”.

The best thing I bought in there

Was a small oil painting of

A Colonial house by a river.

With a family in the front yard.

It was on the floor

Leaning against the wall

In this little room beyond

A back bedroom that someone

Had tried to make into a

Bathroom but had never finished.

It was in a stack of picture frames.

I bought all the pictures frames as one lot.

I paid for them and carried them outside.

I laid them on the lawn.

Then I went back inside the house.

Downtown - Part Three

Downtown

Part Three

            I did not buy it and I left.  But this bottle did not leave me.  All who trespass in art and antiquities (inclusive of the printed antiquity) know well the haunting and lingering of a confrontation one has with a “something good” “I didn’t buy”.  Usually this involves the lonely vigil of personal reflection, private “research”, a futile effort to “tell” “the story” to “someone” and the tossing and turning in one’s mind of “what to do”.  Sometimes this goes on for YEARS, particularly if one REALLY “screwed up”[1].  I haunted the bottle on the counter.  It was there for months.  I held the bottle in my mind.  For months.  I told my mother about it once; on the way home that day.  She said “That’s nice dear”.  NICE!  THE GUY FOUND IT IN THE ALLEY!

            I would visit the store and the bottle all the time “researching it” which was a procedure of trying to figure out how I could buy it and sell it.  In actual fact what I wanted was to “own it”; that is to touch with possession the object that enjoyed the extraordinary mystic of “being found” “on the path” “that I walk on”.  I wanted THAT.  It is only forty years later, as I write, that I can concisely identify this particular interest in this PARTICULAR “old bottle”.  My youthful research proved this:  I could “own” any number of exactly identical bottles for “forty” (dollars) for the trade abounded in them offered at “FIFTY”.  Presuming a discount and “beating down”, one “could have it” for forty, perhaps ...thirty-five “anytime you want one”.  But THAT was not my intrigue although at the time I acted as if it was.

            My eyes haunted the ground.  Could I find that bottle?  My eyes haunted spaces between.  Is there that bottle?  There never was.  The bottle was always on the counter.  It NEVER moved.  Actually, it did move, slowly, backward and toward the rear side of the counter space gathering ever more junk around it.  It was slowly covered with a light dust so that IF someone had recently “handled it” one could “tell” by the finger marks in this dust... .  The price tag I turned away from the customer’s view.  It became old and faded.  Months past.  The dirty fat man was regularly “asleep” beside the store.  I scrutinized him more then ever.

            I didn’t know what he did back then but NOW I know that he “was” “a picker”.  Not a very good one for alcohol was his obsession.  Anyone in the trade does not grant that as a “problem” but more as a “lifestyle” “choice”.  We may all swim to that island at anytime... right?  In any case, that was HIS collection.  To support his acquisitions he “found stuff” and “sold it” in a direct ratio, daily:  Find it, sell it, buy it, drink it.  I could deal with it then and have no problem with it now.  But then my eyes began to scrutinize for DETAILS.

            What could a dirty fat drunk do that would interest me?  FIND STUFF that was “GOOD” is what.  “GOSH”:  HE DID!  And this is what I learned and have NEVER forgotten.  Foremost:  HE WALKED, every where.  He walked in spaces... between.  HA!  Go park the car, lock it and leave.  TAKE THE ELEVATOR to the office.  AND GO TO A FANCY ANTIQUE SHOW TO BUY fine art “trash” for …your… COLLECTION if one cannot see the power this man gained in “walking” “between”.

            Well, I was already walking so I didn’t have much trouble “adding that”.  BUT:  These days?  It takes more skill then one realizes FORTY YEARS LATER.  Secondly, he didn’t seem all that selective about what he “found” and “sold”.  This is a by far more difficult “skill” to “learn”.  The bottom line on this skill is:  “There is junk; people buy junk”.  What this means is that most of what there is to find is “no good” BUT most of the people who “buy” “stuff” DON’T..., I repeat; DON’T know what “good” “is” for, well, how would they so... THEY BUY JUNK.  Swallow hard and repeat that to yourself even if your working your way up to be executive director of the most proper of proper antiquarian society.  The tragic truth to trade in trash is that total trade transpires terribly tirelessly in TRASH.  Trash paintings, trash furniture, trash rare books, trash baubles, trash decorative accessories and trash “good stuff”.  Don’t believe me.  Simply listen to the ceaseless whine and moan of the trade about “that piece of crap” “sold for” “that”.  LEARNING THIS, is hard... and rarely accomplished.  Unless one has “no choice”.

            I had “no choice”.  The easiest way to have no choice is to have no money to “buy” “anything” “good”.  If one has capital and is “interested”, one tends to “BUY” a… what they “THINK” “is good”.  Beside the adage “a fool and his money are parted” this allows that person to ...choose... what they “buy”.  A true picker, I learned from this dirty fat drunk, “BUYS” (finds) what “there is”.  AND SELLS THAT!  Mumbling and stumbling in spaces between, one “finds” “things”.  These are mostly “no good”.  But “they sell”.  NOT for much but... they sell.  Ceaselessly they sell.

            I was already “doing that”; dragging home everything and trying to sell it.  I had a mound.  I had “people” who were actually “dealers” who came to my mound and “bought”.  Wow.  But here at the intersection with the dirty fat man and his bottle I observed that HE was by far more “diverse” in what he sold then I was for, when I examined his “stuff” IT WAS AWFUL.  BUT IT SOLD!  “I mean:  HE’S GETTING MONEY FOR IT!”.  Trying to explain my sudden diversification and expansion of “stock” in my mound in the family barn (“YOU CAN’T BRING IT INSIDE!”) took “a little doing” principally because I was learning as I went along and so had a hard time verbalizing the “experience”.  Fortunately no one seemed “to care” that much except... .  EXCEPT my “customers” who started to come “more often”.  “WASN’T HE JUST HERE?” my mother asked.  And the woman who has the antiques shop that is filled with electric lights?  “She’s BACK?”.

            “But Mom, I found a whole bunch of lights.  She WANTS them!”.  At a buck a piece YOU’D want ‘em.  She knew what she was doing.  So did I.  I still can sell you... “those” to this day (drop by when you have chance).  I “got” “money” because of a dirty fat drunk.

---

[1]:  What’s a good “screw up”?  How about arriving at a very rural “dealer’s” home to see a Queen Anne (1760) highboy in “totally original condition. surface and hardware” being “loaded” by another dealer who has “just bought it” for $3000. (worth $15,000 - $20,000.) after the first dealer “got it” “at a yard sale”.  True, there is no ACTUAL screw up on my part except the ACTUAL “act of God” but, trust me, “you never forget”.

Bunch of Letters in a Desk

Bunch of Letters in a Desk

I took a cardboard box into

The bedroom of the single

Spinster aunt who had lived

There apart from the family.

I carefully looked over her desk

And began placing the contents

Of the drawers

In the box.

I hoped I would find

A bundle of poems

Like Emily Dickinson’s

In the bottom Drawer.

I did not.

I found a corset,

A box of gloves,

And a neatly tied bundle of letters from 1937.

The letters were from a young woman

To this old aunt

When she, too,

Was a young woman.

At the end of the stack

Was a neatly folded clipping

From a newspaper.

I read this too.

It was about an airplane crash in Illinois;

Outside of Chicago in a thunderstorm

in 1937.

Everyone was killed.

I looked at the desk.

It was not

A fine desk but

It was in fine condition.

I looked at the bundle of letters.

They had fit so precisely in the

Right rear corner of the bottom

Drawer of the desk.

I decided I would sell the letters

With the desk and

Include enough family history

To carry out my plan.

I had just the client in mind.

She came back to me several days later.

“I think the two woman

Were in love.” she said.

I gave her the college year book

I found in the desk.

“I bet the pictures of both woman

Are in there.” I said.

Downtown - Part Two

Downtown

Part Two

            Can I find something and give it to you?  Can I say that men smell like pee, drink too much, fall down and pick up cigarette butts on the street?  Do you ever buy painting from this sort of person.  If... one sees a man pushing a shopping cart along the street WITH a FRAME sticking out of it... .  And within that frame one sees an oil painting of “an Arab and camels” and this is from forty, fifty feet “away”.  Do you stop the man and buy it?  When I sold this painting, “signed by the artist”, the “fine arts” dealer spent a good six minutes “going over it” with his “glass”.  Probably this was because of the “price” I was “asking”.  Right?

            I remember, after school, going to this one “store” where at nearly every visit there was this man in dirty clothes lying next to the building in the shade ...asleep.  ONE DAY, a Saturday, I “went there” “early” and this same man was INSIDE the store selling an “old bottle”.  The proprietor only casually regarded my entrance to the store for... I’d been there “before”.  I was left to wander.  I was in ear shot of the on-going exchange.  It was a transaction in progress?  It was!  The man, a fat man in the dirty clothes, was trying to SELL the bottle.  I saw the bottle.  I liked old bottles.  There were not any other old bottles in this store.  In fact, the store, particularly to the back, was filled mostly with old magazines.  Stacks and mounds of old magazines.  Columns, towers and spilled cascades of old magazines.  Wet, stained, smelly, trampled terminal moraines of ...old magazines.  Except, of course, for the odd angled partition way to the rear right where, if one was youthful and agile, one could, at an un-noticed moment, slither “behind” and discover a little space filled with “dirty” magazines... very neatly arranged.  These were not the kind of dirty magazines my friends at school “ripped-off” from corner drug stores.  They were “better”.  I had been into that space enough already to have passed beyond fatal attraction.  I was more interested in what was “new” in the store.  That “material” was toward the front, on top of the counter and in the left front window, a space accessed from only behind the counter where the proprietor stood.

            My:  Wouldn’t this man have curious old things for sale.  What was curious about them was not that they could be qualified as “good” in the appraising eyes of the “people who know”.  What made them good to me was that anyone would “try” to sell them... at all.  The “antiques” shops that I frequented (and frequent them I did) never had “stuff” like this man “offered”.  In fact, this man’s stuff looked like the STUFF one saw on the TRASH!  WOW!  And I would always ask how much for this or that and glow while the proprietor glowered and wished me away.  As there was rarely anyone in the store but I... that (the glowering) was that.  When there WAS someone in the store and I NOW know that they were DEALERS (actually; I pretty quickly figured that out), I spent all of those moments watching and listening to EVERYTHING; each noise, motion and gesture featured toward each object.   The camera rolling of my mind captured vast footage of interaction over “stuff” from “the trash”.  BUT:  It also captured people; real people.  I didn’t realize I was learning about “that” “too”.

            This stuff, I discerned, was acquired by the proprietor from “people” who “found it” and brought it into the store and “sold it”.  That was the source of these curiosities; these “people” who I soon learned are “pickers”.  I learned I was and... still am... one of these “people”.  Like many of the shops of this sort, the proprietor had preferences for a certain direction of stock that one may see to this day.  Coins (in little ink labeled paper cases), guns (usually of dubious quality and condition), knives (extensively jack-knives) and pocket watches (“good ones”) always seemed to surround the immediate working space of the proprietor of this sort of store.  I suppose to this day that “they” “like that” “stuff”.  Beyond these treasures was the “rest of the stuff”; iota purchased and placed out of reach of a customer and also away from bothering the proprietor’s “workspace”, an area generally used for sitting, smoking and reading the newspaper while a radio station one has never heard of “plays” something at a low volume “always”.

            I understood the dispersal of goods and quickly assimilated the learned skill of visually dissecting the “mound of accumulation” method of inventory management.  To this day I may be found staring at piles of “stuff” looking for that “stuff” that is “new” to a “pile”.  The counter area added drama to my youth for it required that I stand in full view of the owner of these things while I, I learned to do, scanned the mound behind the counter, the shelves behind the counter, the trail side of the path to the front window from behind the counter AND the silent mental review of the contents of that front window that I had studied before I entered the shop (often the head and eyes of the proprietor would appear above me from inside the window before I entered) all IN COMPLETE SILENCE.  Silence, complete, is a trademark of professionalism in the “trade”.

            The art eye and art mind in motion, silently climbing and descending mountains of “trash” was and is my action as a picker.  This is tiring exercise, well understood by those who do it and is loathed by those who do not.  It is so much easier for pretty dealers to ask if one has “something good”.  These... fools… not only expose themselves to a “price” but, of endless curiosity to me, are requesting a showing of “good stuff” from ...someone who wouldn’t know “GOOD” from a ...cat box cookie.  Don’t do that (ask anyone to show… anything).  After the visual hike upon the material mountain I would ask a price of single items.  ONLY THEN, after fully knowing the price, would I ask, ever so politely, to handle the item.  EVEN IF IT WAS the “worst piece of crud” “you ever saw”.  This is because the requisition of an object required the proprietor to “do something” as opposed to sit, smoke and read the newspaper.  Further, I learned, the objects of greatest interest to me were usually the most dejectedly positioned on the behind counter mountainside so I had to “handle the situation” “carefully” to not... anger the proprietor.

            I accomplished this.  The way I accomplished it was to develop the in-the-trade understanding that before requisitioning an item I was, preferably, 85% plus sure that I was “going to buy” “that”.  THERE was the secret admission I obtained to this store:  I BOUGHT “stuff”.  REGARDLESS of how much this man “HATED” “KIDS” “IN THE STORE” I quickly gained rank above “that” because I “BOUGHT”.  The proprietor, at first, would try to sell me coins or knives or any other bauble he felt a boy would “want”.  That would take place AFTER I had agreed to “buy” “that”:  “You want that?”.  Soon, the man recognized I was not going to buy anything he thought I should and seemed, to his knowing eye, to be much more attracted to “stuff” that he “got” that was “cheap”.  Although it was years before I was “allowed” to be “alone” with his stock, he quickly granted me a courtesy of ignoring me, particularly if someone else was in the store.  This extended to allowing me to gaze, gawk, touch, reach, poke, pull and fondle anything I could reach around the counter area without any comment.  THAT was power.  That allowed me to dawdle in the midst of a transaction with a “He’s (she’s) a dealer”.  It also allowed me to... dawdle near a “buying” situation, although to this day I KNOW most dealers do not like “anyone” to “be around” when they’re “buying” “no matter what”.  But I persisted in hovering and, since I was a kid... got away with it.  THAT power position allowed me to be next to the dirty fat man with the old bottle that Saturday morning.  I HEARD the decision that the proprietor would not “pay twenty for that” and the emphatic “ITS WORTH A HUNDRED” from the dirty fat man which resulted in the bottle being placed on the counter “for sale” for “twenty-five, I get five”.  I also learned that the dirty fat man had FOUND IT (!) while walking along the curving path behind the two buildings and across the vacant lot up beyond the store.  FOUND IT he said because he was looking down and saw the top of the bottle shining in the sun at the top of the dirt in the lot.  He, seeing such an odd piece of amber glass had got down on his knees and excavated the whole and perfect specimen; had recognized its commercial value and ... had scurried on down the vacant lot’s path to the store to vend his discovery.

            GOOD GRACIOUS was I fully attentive for... a number of reasons.  Of course I concealed that by spending the whole of this conversation pretending to be extremely and suddenly very interested in a book about the guns of World War II that was “just down” from the counter.  Foremost, the reason the bottle was discovered was because it did have a very large top, a mushroom shaped lip of thick amber glass that protected the cylinder shaped body of the bottle.  That full form I recognized as the well regarded “TIPPECANOE” medicine bottle; an embossed with the decoration of a log and a canoe patent medicine bottle that was ... “GOOD” ... if you ... “found it”.  SECONDLY I knew “exactly” where the path through the vacant lot was because I walked on it when I came to the store.  “WOW!” and before the official end of the two party consignment negotiation took place I left the store, traversed the street to the two buildings and followed the path into the vacant lot.  Sure enough, after a very easy examination I discovered, just to the left of the path the exact hole of discovery and excavation complete with the molded outline of the base of the bottle where it had been pulled from the soil.  “WOW!”.

            I returned to the store to find the man gone and the bottle on the counter.  I handled it without asking.  The proprietor watched me, said nothing, watched me as I sat it back down and then put a “$25.00” price sticker on it.  The bottle was still dirty.  It even had dirt inside but it also still had a piece of the cork in it’s top.  I handled the bottle again, holding it up to the light from the front windows. “TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS” expressed all that I could develop as mental energy.  This was because I KNEW that the fat dirty man was right; that it was a “hundred dollar bottle”.  Actually it was only a SEVENTY-FIVE dollar bottle.  And actually, that value, I understood, turned downward to a “FIFTY DOLLAR BOTTLE” should one wish “quick” “resale”.  Quick resale was the core of my skill for capital outlay during my eighth grade year floundered at “twenty” or higher.  Even at “fifty” it was not a “sure thing” to ... an eighth grader.

            But the poetry of the story was true!  Oh was it true.  And I, like a blind fool had walked that same trail a hundred times.  And my eyes had never rested on the treasure.  OH and that MAN had FOUND IT!  Between the buildings!  Why of course! Treasure is found in spaces between!  OF COURSE!  Must I?  I must!  From now on:  EVERY SPACE that is between!  The bottle sat on the counter.  I did not buy it.  I left.

Downtown - Part One

Downtown

Part One

            My manor and time management changed when I became an antiques dealer.  I stopped a normal development into the abyss of the “I don’t know” of humanity and replaced it with a “I know very, very well”.  I knew I wanted to find “antiques” I could sell.  No one else I knew wanted to do “that”.  They thought I was “weird”.

            There was no problem turning my back on that opposition.  I was in Junior High School.  The only time I ever saw those ...people... was in this school, during the day, generally “between classes” and “at lunch”.  The rest of the time I didn’t know where they were or what they did.  We all took a school bus home.  They, it seemed to me, did “stuff” like “watch TV”.  I did that too, but, forever less and less.  To this day I “don’t have time” to “watch it”.  Why?

            I discovered that I didn’t have to take the school bus home.  The school was “downtown” and I could:  WELL:  I COULD WALK “downtown”.  “Yeah right”:  Over to Woolworth’s and “hang out”.  No; much worse.

            I discerned that I could “walk” to “antiques shops”.  These days, nobody would walk that far for any of these shops for they were hardly “antiques” “stores”.  They were (and are) actually junk stores on the very FAR END of, typically, any town… with a… downtown.  They are in neighborhoods where “no one” “walks” “much”.  I was a youthful pioneer on foot; a traveler in a wild wilderness that when I verbalized it to my young friends, they just stared at me and... “I don’t know”.  Too bad.

            What I didn’t realize was that not that many other people went there “too”.  It took me a decade to realize this.  Ascertain:  I thought that anyone would go to these stores to buy antiques because they actually “got them” and they were “cheap”.  But I never saw “anybody”.  “Anybody” was (and remains) the body of “respectable people” who “have an interest in antiques”.  They are not going to park their car “down there”.  “WALK?” was (is) not in their vocabulary.  “All they have is junk anyway.” remains to this day the standard melody I “hear”.  Furthermore; and this took me TWO decades to understand, these “places” are not where “proper people” “in the trade” “are found”.  “Oh.” is what I said TWENTY YEARS after my “junior high school” “experiences”.  Now I don’t even bother to say that.

            The experience of walking vast distances through bad neighborhoods that “nobody goes to” did teach me eloquent lessons that I have never forgotten, continue to exploit and am now very glad I have for they stack up real good against the sissy, cry baby, black polished shoes of the trade that are “always” “trying” to explain to me that they “deal in” “good stuff”.  This last is relative, I’ve learned.  It is defined very precisely by... the one that utters the words.  MEANWHILE, back on the frontiers of my youth and “trade development”, none of this was of any concern.  I arranged with my mother to “pick me up” at a designated and obscure parking lot behind a church.  Easy in and easy out for the driver combined with low profile “waiting spot” for a kid who... was carrying a piece of furniture, an “old painting”, a “picture in a frame”, a... “bag of old books” OR GOD KNOWS WHAT BECAUSE JESUS (in the church) KNOWS HEAVEN FORBID WHAT I “dragged home” from this “parking space”.

            “What” is, in hindsight, unimportant to me.  It would not be to YOU.  The simple formula of “buy low - sell high” of fine decorative arts or old printing would make your lips smack, your hands rub together and the ole “HEY KID HOW MUCH YOU WANT FOR THAT?” come out of ...YOUR mouth.  I recall buying, for example, my first folding “pocket map” of “TEXAS” “back then”.  I don’t know “what” map it “was”.  I know it was “OLD” and in a red leather “case” (it was twenty years before I ...affected... the use of that word).  I recollect I had it for a while and would open it up in my room every now and then and stare at it.  I reconvene that the State of Texas looked funny on it and that it was “definitely” “hand colored”.  Some dealer screwed me out of it when they “came” to “my room” to “buy”.  If I bought it for “six” ($6.00) I would sell it for “sixty-six” ($66.00) or the same.  For this “old map” I paid, I very precisely remember... “four”.  So what if “the piece of shit” would have “paid for a year of college”.  This opinion of “the pissing away” of the “good stuff” I’ve “found” has never really changed over the years.  The interpretations of “what to do” “with it” have, but, as I write, I find I am more refined then ever to my commitment of “Is it the object or the ...finding of the object... I like?”.  It is definitely the latter.  Forget the map.  Forget the paintings I’ve sold (sell).  They are all in collections of “people” who are “keeping them”.  I found them.

            Where was I then?  WHERE YOU ARE NOT.  And this where became my school and today is my sanctuary. I am forever blessed by the actual walking away from all that I “could have been”.  Stuffy, sordid, clubby, formalized abominations of faux sophisticates with responsible positions, respectable parking spaces and dreadful NOTHING[1] lives fell away from me so early in my life that it has taken me decades to piece this falling away together.  Last year a women elaborated to my wife in great detail about going “to see” “a movie” but, after a reflective moment qualified it all by saying that my wife “wouldn’t like it anyway because you guys live in a movie.”.  We do.

            The specific and formative division AND fatal attraction of “this business” was (and is) the “people”; the social theater and its “set” where upon this theater is acted.  It is not theater.  It is dreadfully real.  HORRID, stomach turning, vomiting humanity from dawn until dusk passes upon me OR I PASS UPON IT.  Daily (with the exception of the not unusual habit of mine of “ending” the “day” in some “shop” of “some dealer” “I know”) I “spend my time” amongst.  YOU ARE NOT THERE, ever.  I cannot even take you there for you’d either “mess it up” or “freak out” or “foul your pants” at an inopportune moment.  Trust me; you don’t even WANT to “go there”.

            WHY?  Because it really truly is outside the boundaries of everything that attracted you to antiquities and rare books in the first place and the “which” that represents “the stable” of “life”.  It is not clean, polite, pleasant, proper, placed, polished, positioned, poignant, picturesque, pigeon breasted, piffle or pietistical.  It is, for me, an active phylaxis that keeps... you... away from ...me.  There we find “FORGET THE MAP”.  If the mouse runs in and out of the eye socket of the human skull in the desert of human existence then I was very early this mouse.  If it does not, then I won’t be seeing you “later”.  This brings us back to after school adventures in my junior high school days.

---

[1]:  “NOTHING”:  The vast life where nothing happens, ever, excepting redundancies, infractions, disturbances, titillations and salty tales from mariners in port briefly from the sea of ...LIFE.  “Would you like something to drink?”.